Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Poetry Break: Rebby Sharp's "Exquisite Corpse" Poetry?

Yesterday, I blogged about the sung poem "Automatic Bifocals" and linked to a website by one of the poem's collaborators, Rebby Sharp.

This morning, I took a closer look at her website, which sets the lines of her poetry not to music but to images like the one above. Or perhaps she first created the images and then composed a line of poetry to accompany each one. I wasn't sure from what she writes:

The main purpose of this site is to share these drawings in the form of slideshows. Each drawing is accompanied by a phrase. These phrases are assembled in the manner of an exquisite corpse poem.

These images are drawn in an automatic way with indelible marker and filled in with oil pastel color. This method was inspired by and approximates pictures that I produced on the enjoyable KidPix software. I have been making outline drawings for a long time.

I'm also not sure what she intends by saying that the "images are drawn in an automatic way," but perhaps she means that she doesn't reflect in advance upon a concept of the any of the images and thus outlines them 'unselfconsciously', afterwards filling them in arbitrarily with colors. The method seems to work for her. At least, I enjoy the often brightly odd but usually cheerful images. (Your mileage may vary.)

Ms. Sharp's poetry apparently follows a similar principle of composition, setting out an arbitrary sequence of lines, each one of which itself seems to have been written not to express self-conscious sense but to reflect surrealistic nonsense. Here's one example, from a sequence associated with the image above:

Surrealistic nonsense these lines may be, but I find great, humorous sense in some of them, e.g., "Prevail sweet butter in these times of oleogarchy." I imagine this line began with an unexpected pun on "oligarchy" and was written to reflect what "oleogarchy" might mean -- a tyranny of margarine, I presume. The line seems unconnected to its corresponding image, but you can take a look on Ms. Sharp's site for sore eyes and see for yourself.

For the record, Ms. Sharp tells us that she composed the lines of her poetry "in the manner of an exquisite corpse poem," and she has linked to Wikipedia's entry by way of explanation:

Exquisite corpse (also known as "exquisite cadaver" or "rotating corpse") is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

Or so said Wikipedia as of this morning, but a wiki entry is something of an exquisite corpse itself and could change by the time you access it to check, as each collaborator alters the composition.

According to Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding in A Book of Surrealist Games (Shambhala, 1995, 143–144), the expression "exquisite corpse" comes from a phrase written when Surrealists first used the method: "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." In English, this reads as "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine." That sounds rather like a blasphemous allusion to the promise of the wine to be enjoyed by the resurrected saints at the eschaton's heavenly feast, a sacred meal already enjoyed proleptically through the eucharistic bread and wine (cf. Matthew 26:29; Mark 14:25; Luke 22:18).

But back to Ms. Sharp. Although the exquisite corpse method of composition apparently requires collaboration, she does not say if she had a collaborator in her poetic compositions (though she did collaborate with Jon Graham on their poems in Hydrogen Bums). If not, then I wonder if these poems on her website are, technically, exquisite corpse poetry.

A variation on the method, incidentally, might be implemented by selecting recognizable lines from famous poems and arranging them to form exquisite nonsense. Perhaps I'll try that myself sometime . . .

8 Comments:

Ms. Sharp did the artwork herself, but I'm not sure about the 'poems' since they're called "exquisite corpse" poems, which would seem to require a collaborator, but I also don't know how closely Sharp was adhering to the 'ex-cor' compositional method.

I am reminded of the work of Don Van Vliet, AKA Captain Beefheart. HEre, fro example, are the lyrics to the song "Bat Chain Puller":

bat chain puller [several repeats] a chain with yellow lights that glistens like oil beads on its slick smooth trunk that trails behind on tracks and thumps a wing hangs limp and retrieves bat chain puller puller puller bulbs shoot from its snoot and vanish into darkness it whistles like a root snatched from dry earth sod bust and rakes with grey dust claws announces its coming in the morning this train with grey tubes that houses people's very thoughts and belongings [several repeats] this train with grey tubes that houses people's thoughts their very remains and belongings a grey cloth patch caught with four threads and the hollow wind of its stacks ripples felt fades and grey sparks clacks lunge into cushion thickets pumpkins span the hills with orange crayola patches green inflated trees balloon up into marshmallow soot that walks away in faulty circles caught in grey blisters with twinkling lights and green sashes drawn by rubber dolphins with gold yawning mouths that blister and break in agony in zones of rust they gild gold sawdust into dust

In the 80's my word writing was for song lyric application used in Orthotonics, of which I was an original member,Butterglove of which I was a guest singer and Skeleton Crew of whom I am a great fan. Candle Mambo by the Captain inspired lyrics in part to Big Head, an Orthotonic's original.

Thanks, Ms. Sharp, for visiting and providing the interesting details.

If one lives long enough, or so I'm discovering, one's path sometimes crosses again a place visited in younger days -- I was listening to Skeleton Crew back in the mid-80s, in Fribourg, Switzerland (as I mentioned in the previous blog), and here I am again, nodding in recognition.

About Me

I am a professor at Ewha Womans University, where I teach composition, research writing, and cultural issues, including the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history.
My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism.
I also work as one-half of a translating team with my wife, and our most significant translation is Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil, which was funded by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested.
I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries.
Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."